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CHOWN(2) System Calls Manual CHOWN(2) NAME chown, fchown - change owner and group of a file SYNOPSIS int chown(const char *path, int owner, int group) DESCRIPTION The file that is named by path has its owner and group changed as spec- ified. Only the super-user may change the owner of the file, because if users were able to give files away, they could defeat file-space ac- counting procedures. The owner of the file may change the group to a group of which he is a member. On some systems, chown clears the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on the file to prevent accidental creation of set-user-id and set-group-id programs. RETURN VALUE Zero is returned if the operation was successful; -1 is returned if an error occurs, with a more specific error code being placed in the global variable errno. ERRORS Chown will fail and the file will be unchanged if: [ENOTDIR] A component of the path prefix is not a directory. [ENAMETOOLONG] The path name exceeds PATH_MAX characters. [ENOENT] The named file does not exist. [EACCES] Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix. [ELOOP] Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname. [EPERM] The effective user ID is not the super-user. [EROFS] The named file resides on a read-only file system. [EFAULT] Path points outside the process's allocated address space. [EIO] An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system. SEE ALSO chown(8), chgrp(1), chmod(2). 4th Berkeley Distribution May 22, 1986 CHOWN(2)